MPs and Syria - a defence of politicians

Events in Aleppo shock us all and, as we do when such things happen, we look around for people or organisations at which we can point a finger. "You should have done something," we cry. "Why didn't you act." "Blood is on your hands," "Something must be done."

The most common target for these cries, for this opprobrium is the politician:

Shame on you, Ed Miliband. Look at the “complete meltdown of humanity” that (according to the UN’s spokesman) is Aleppo today. Look at the footage of terror, trauma and dislocation. Then, if you dare, ask what you might have done to prevent it.

I hold no particular love for Ed Miliband and don't consider him the finest example of the political class but I believe this sort of attack illustrates a problem. It is very easy for someone who is not a politician, in this case the journalist Matthew d'Ancona, to lay into the choices that a politician makes about war. Mr d'Ancona - or for that matter, any other commenters - did not have to spent hours thinking through the consequences of a decision to put lives at risk. And in the case of Syria - as we've seen with Iraq and seen with Afghanistan - the decision makers are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I refuse to indulge in this attack on politicians for making difficult - life and death - decisions. I am grateful that, back in August 2013, I was not one of those MPs charged with the decision to approve military action in Syria. One part of me looks at the events in Syria before that date and cries for justice, for someone to stop the atrocities visited on innocent Syrians - I recall a work colleague who spoke of how her brother-in-law's family had been exterminated for being seen as on the wrong side of a line they didn't know about.

But another part of me remembers thinking this about Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilians dying beneath our bombs however carefully targeted those bombs might have been. And British servicemen killed and maimed fighting a humanitarian war in a place they'd never heard of before they'd signed up to defend their country.

I don't know how I would have voted had I been an MP that day but, as a politician of sorts, I'm not ready to condemn Ed Miliband or anyone else for making the decision they made back in 2013. Away from the actual decision-making it's very easy isn't it.

"Launch the bombers!"

"Send in the troops."

Yet in making these decisions we condemn people to die - either because we did act or because we didn't act. So when MPs sat and debated Syria - including many now focused on the terrible scenes unfolding in Aleppo - they had to weigh up what might be the consequences of action or inaction knowing that, however much pundits like Matthew d'Ancona might shout, there is no obvious and right course of action.

Instead of finding some politician to blame let's think of the majority of MPs, from whichever party, sitting with a cup or tea or a glass of beer thinking about how to vote on committing Britain to war. For some there'll be family and friends to help (or perhaps hinder) their thoughts, for others it's entirely lonely. A few of the gung ho or ideologically-driven will, uncaringly, find the decision easy but most MPs will waver and haver over whether to drop British bombs on Syrian targets.

Perhaps we should have decided to bomb Syria in August 2013. Maybe the events of the last few days are the consequence, in part, of us deciding not to drop those bombs. Whatever, with the sunlight of glorious hindsight, seems to be right or wrong, we should not blame MPs for hesitating before committing to risk the lives of British servicemen and Syrian civilians. Above all we were not sat in the House of Commons that day charged with the horrible task of choosing between death and destruction or death and destruction with British involvement. We do not live with that decision, with those dead bodies - politicians do.

....

In whose name? A comment on democratic will and other such stuff.

"Not in my name is the cry". Petitions are posted, letters are written, placards are badly spelled, frantic facebook rants are posted. "Not in my name".

Well, yes, absolutely. It's not in your name. Never has been in your name. Never will be in your name. That's whole point really. About this representative democracy lark, I mean. It's not done on the basis of individual approval but of collective approval. So long as fifty per cent plus one of the good folk we choose to represent us in parliament say we do it, we do it. What you and I think doesn't matter. We get to keep our powder dry until the next time we get to choose someone to represent us.

You don't think MPs are any good? Fine - that's your absolute right. But they're all we've got - the inadequate, incompetent, venal and self-serving bastion protecting us from rule by faceless bureaucrats, arrogant technocrats and anonymous securicrats. Depressing I know but that's it really which is why we should pay attention to the voting stuff and take it seriously. It's also why those people who say "we don't need any more politicians" are wrong - we need as many politicians as we can get if we want to hold the government to account - from parish councillors to peers of the realm.

Yesterday - and this is what has prompted all the 'not in my name' stuff - MPs voted to approve airstrikes against targets inside Syria. This followed a week or so of frenetic pseudo-debate and a full day of parliamentary debate culminating in that vote. And it's true that MPs, in arriving at a decision, did so with a variety of motives and reasons. Some will have supported (or opposed) airstrikes simply from loyalty to party - my party leader says one thing or the other, therefore I back that position. And this isn't a bad thing - we decry loyalty and trust too readily resulting in a world where such behaviour is assumed to be self-serving, shallow and essentially corrupt. But, for a complicated issue such as whether to take military action, it isn't copping out to take the view that, all things being equal, you'll go along with the foreign minister and defence minister appointed by your Party's government.

Others - and we saw a bit of this yesterday - will have made their decision on the basis of a moral stance ('I'm a pacifist' or 'ISIS is evil and must be stopped') without consideration of tactics. Again we see this described as sophistry or as disingenuous - as if politicians can never support something on grounds of simple conscience. Worse still, people (as they shout 'not in my name' again and again) make a moral judgement about the reasons for people making the choice - if that choice supports our view its noble and brave, if not its because of bullying, political calculation or stupidity (sometimes all three).

I'm not persuaded by the argument for bombing. Not because of any objection to war or crocodile tears over the civilian deaths that will happen whether or not we bomb. No, my concern is that there seems to be no idea as to what the end of all this looks like. I didn't listen to every word yesterday but I didn't hear an argument setting out a strategy aimed at creating a place to which several million refugees can return and live a fulfilling life in peace and happiness. And I didn't see how bombing Raqqa stops terrorists already in the UK, USA or France from machine-gunning or bombing innocents just to wave their murderous islamo-fascist ideology in our liberal democratic faces.

But my argument lost. Maybe for honourable reasons, perhaps because there's internal turmoil in the Labour Party, perhaps because too many MPs, ministers and media folk didn't understand the issues. But mostly because there was a feeling - one echoed outside the febrile world of Westminster - that, following Paris, something had to be done. And targeted bombing is something.

That bombing isn't being done in your name. It's being done by the UK government on the authorisation of parliament. If you didn't like how your MP voted on this then come the next election you get the chance to vote for someone else - it's how our imperfect system works. If you can stomach party politics, you can join one of the parties and make your case from inside. But shouting 'not in my name' is fatuous and serves no purpose except to make you feel a little bit better about the fact that parliament decided to do something you don't like.

....

Taking Charlotte Church's comments on Syria seriously (for a minute or two)

****

Miss Church appeared on the BBC's Question Time. Presumably because it was in Wales and she's got herself a new reputation as a left wing activist. During the debate Miss Church had this to say:

‘Another interesting thing with Syria actually, lots of people don’t seem to know about it, is there is evidence to suggest that climate change was a big factor in how the Syrian conflict came about, because from 2006-2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history.

This of course meant that there were water shortages and crops weren’t growing so there was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria in the urban centres which put more strain and resources were scarce etc which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today, and so no issue is an island, so I also think we need to look at what we’re doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.’

On the face of it, this is nonsense. It's not exactly like there's never been a drought before in the middle east:

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.”

But there's a lot of support for the idea that the drought beginning in 2007 was a factor in creating the Syrian civil war:

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend.

It doesn't really matter whether the reason for the drought is long-term (i.e. global warming or climate change) or short-term (simply a bad run of dry weather) but it does seem plausible that the impact of that drought on a rural population will be considerable. This doesn't mean that the consequence of drought need necessarily be violent upheaval - it's clear that this hasn't occurred in the wider Fertile Crescent (and that there's some doubt about the data).

More interesting here is that idea that it is urban-rural migration that's the culprit rather than the climate. Miss Church says that there was a 'mass migration' of this sort in Syria. But this may simply reflect the world-wide trend for people in rural areas to move to cities.

Today, the words rif and medina have developed not just geographic connotations, but social ones as well. The rif not only describes village farmers but those urban poor living in the slums sprouting up around Syria’s cities. This “village-izing” of Syria’s ancient cities has changed the complexion of urban space with the growth of large unplanned, parallel communities of urban poor.

There's nothing peculiar about this pattern - it's repeated in developing countries across the world (despite the best efforts of the development industry to stop people in poor rural communities exercising this liberty). And, given that we're talking about the growth of violent revolutionary forces - in this case Islamist forces - perhaps this upheaval has contributed? It does seem that these marginal communities contributed to the rise of Islamist parties in Turkey and to the challenges in Egypt:

Shrinking opportunities in the countryside have led to a steady rural-urban migration. Cities have grown at twice the rate of the general population in the last two centuries. This has led to overurbanization, this is, more people in the cities than can be properly housed, educated, or gainfully employed...it is estimated that the population of Greater Cairo has grown from about three hundred thousand in 1800 to over twelve million in 1995. With this phenomenal demographic growth have come serious problems. Much of the discontent that has been channeled into militant Islamic activism is a direct or indirect outcome of population pressures and overurbanisation.

I've no doubt at all that the five year drought may have accelerated the movement from country to town in Syria and indeed that, as we've seen in other places, this dislocated new urban community provides a place for a radical, non-traditional and violent version of Islam to thrive. It's too simplistic - and therefore wrong - to try and claim that it's climate change that did it but, if climatic alteration contributed to an accelerated rate of internal migration, then we are equally wrong to dismiss what Charlotte Church said as complete nonsense.

....

Refugees...the Conservative case for welcome

****

This evening we're sitting in the pub retelling the old tales, things we've been told by folk in times past. And during this talk one of those post-WW2 stories was told. A story of a Pole or Ukrainian walking across Europe ahead of the Russian armies desperate to find a place of freedom. The detail doesn't matter just the remembering of the effort and sacrifice - leaving friends and family behind, hiding from Soviet troops, living off the land hoping for the occasional, unexpected act of kindness.

Scroll forward nearly 70 years and ask yourself how these young men (they were mostly young men) differ from the young men we see clutching the gunnels of a rickety boat or crowded into some railway station or other? I forget how many people were displaced by WW2 - 30, 50, perhaps 60 million? Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, Germans, Italians and Jews. People who saw their homeland destroyed by war and then, seemingly arbitrarily, moved from Poland to the Soviet Union or from Germany to Poland.

Today we look - a blink of an eye later in terms of human history - and these people (or rather their descendants) are settled, content in the new places they found. Hence the stories. And the thousands of sturdy English men and women who, when asked, will tell you of their Polish mum, Ukrainian grandad or Latvian father. And everywhere across Europe the story is the same - the descendants of those refugees are part of the place they finally landed.

Here in Bradford we still remember the struggle of the captive nations, mark the Soviet genocide of holodomor, and recall the destruction of Srebenicia. We do this because it's right and, just as importantly, because the consequence of these struggles is part of the history and tradition of the City. Just as we mark Pakistan's creation and the independence of Jamaica.

So when we ask whether we should welcome a few Syrian refugees, we should recall these tales and say 'yes, we can help'. Not just because it's the right thing to do but because so much of our city's meaning comes from people who crossed the world to be in Bradford. Those few Syrians will, I'm sure, mark another group who found welcome here and who bring a new set of stories. My hope is that a future group of Bradfordians - in 50 years time - will be sat in the pub telling tales. And one of those tales will be about a Syrian who climbed fences, crossed boundaries and walked miles just to find peace and freedom.

To turn people away because "we're full" or worse "it's not our problem" is to deny our shared humanity. And - as a Conservative, more sadly - to deny the opportunity to share the history and tradition of our land. A place without that tale of effort and sacrifice in search of freedom, choice and a better life.

...

It probably won't work. A postscript on Syria.

****

We are always conflicted on humanitarian matters, on Britain's role in the world and on whether the suffering of civilians in some foreign place is, or isn't, our business. And if it is our business, what the nature of that business should be.

So we have - inconsistently and selectively - intervened. Sometimes this intervention is one of those surgical strikes beloved of my neo-conservative friends, more often it's a series of bombings that are not quite so precisely targeted. And sometimes it's real troops nervously clutching guns as they creep down unfamiliar streets unsure whether the people they see are friend of foe and whether the next corner will mean a bomb, death or the shattering of limbs.

We convince ourselves that this is right and, just as importantly, effective.

But:

To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.

In layman's terms interventions increase civilians casualties rather than decrease them.

Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences of countering murderous groups.

OK it's just one study and others may wish to challenge the findings but for me it's a reminder that, as ever, we should be careful what we wish for. And to understand that righteousness and good intentions alone do not suffice to put things right, you need a strategy that works too.

It seems to me that military intervention in Syria may increase civilian deaths. And if this is a definite risk (and leaving the moral issues to one side for now) what is needed to eliminate that risk so as to ensure our end is achieved?

....

Taking sides in Syria - mad, bad and dangerous

****

It seems to me an utter nonsense to seek to end a war by giving the side that appears to be losing more guns. Yet that is precisely - all wrapped up in weasel words about the situation and castigastion of the Assad regime - what we're saying;

Its joint statement said the members had agreed to "provide urgently all necessary materiel and equipment to the opposition on the ground, each country in its own way in order to enable them to counter brutal attacks by the regime and its allies".

And, as ever, this decision - essentially a decision to escalate violence in Syria - is promoted on the basis of the most bizarre judgement. It's not because giving the "Western-backed rebel military command" means supporting the good guys. Nope, we're doing this because some chemical weapons have been used and this was the 'red line' that mustn't be crossed or else!

I could get all geopolitical, talk about arming one or other side in the ever more divisive scrap been Sunni and Shia Muslims. Or argue that we're fighting a daft proxy war with Russia and Iran lining up against the USA and Saudi Arabia. But I'm not going to do that.

No, I'm going to say that, terrible though events in Syria are, it's absolutely none of our business. By all means send relief to refugees, medical equipment to save lives and food for the starving. Definitely clamber onto the moral high ground and tell those fighting to stop it and come and talk to each other to see if there's a way to sort the mess out without murdering half the population.

But arming the rebels. That's taking sides. And we know just how loved we are across the Middle East for taking sides! Before we know there will be a queue of comfortable Syrian exiles and a veritable platoon of ex-military and former diplomatic chaps calling for 'no fly zones', for blockades and for even bigger bombs and guns for the friendly jihadist rebels.

To say it again - it really is none of our business any more than it was any of Gaddafi's business (or for that matter Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton's business) that we fought a long campaign against terrorists in Northern Ireland.

Again. Giving arms to insurgents in Middle East countries - whether we consider them good guys or not - is a monumentally stupid idea. And not why we have a defence budget.

....

George Galloway: sometimes it takes an Arab to explain...

****

George appeared on a Syrian sponsored TV station in the Lebanon and got into some bother:

He then goes on to farcically defend the Iranian regime, telling an audience member, "You make me sick", forcing him to walk out as Galloway utters, "Alhamdulillah"

Indeed it seems mighty odd that George "Bradford Spring" Galloway is defending the Syrian regime (not to mention the regime in Iran) so I was helped out by Karl Sharro, Lebanese blogger and commentor on Arab democracy who imagined George reflecting on how his first Syrian-funded TV appearance had gone:

Al-hamdullilah today we have completed the first episode of my new show at Al-Mayadeen television channel, for which I will be receiving £3000 per episode. The money will go towards buying more houses that I can name after important moments in the history of the Palestinian struggle inshallah. Perhaps a villa on the French Riviera. There’s so much more that I can do for Palestine, like I keep reminding Syrians.

When the producers of the show first contacted me, I was a bit anxious. ‘Would I have to wear a tight-fitting bodysuit and pretend to be a cat?’ Somebody had told me that was haram. Also, that it made it look like I would do anything for money. They reassured me that wouldn’t be the case, I would just have to be myself. Well, not exactly myself, I decided Arabs would like me more if I pretended to be Eli Wallach playing an Arab in a spaghetti western.

Do read the rest of Karl's reflections - they are rather funny and to the point. But the saddest thing about all this is that George will get into more trouble for thoughtless foot-in-mouth remarks about rape and disability than he will for defending murderous dictatorial regimes on TV stations with possible links to one or other (or both) of those regimes.

....